The Active Side of Infinity (3 page)

"Did you hear that voice from the depths of you?" he asked.

"I think I did," I lied.

"What did it say to you?" he inquired in an urgent tone.

"I can't think of it, don Juan," I muttered.

"Ah, you are back in your daily mind," he said and patted me
forcefully on the back. "Your
daily mind has taken over again.
Let's relax it by talking about your collection of memorable
events.
I should tell you that the selection of what to put in your album is not an
easy matter. This
is the reason I say that making this album is an
act of war. You have to remake yourself ten times
over in order
to know what to select."

I clearly understood then, if only for a second, that I had two minds;
however, the thought was
so vague that I lost it instantly.
What remained was just the sensation of an incapacity to fulfill
don
Juan's requirement. Instead of graciously accepting my incapacity, though, I
allowed it to
become a threatening affair. The driving force of my
life, in those days, was to appear always in a
good light. To
be incompetent was the equivalent of being a loser, something that was
thoroughly
intolerable to me. Since I didn't know how to respond to
the challenge don Juan was posing, I did
the only thing
I knew how to do: I got angry.

"I've got to think a great deal more about this, don Juan," I
said. "I've got to give my mind
some time to settle on the
idea."

"Of course, of course," don Juan assured me. "Take all
the time in the world, but hurry."

Nothing else was said about the subject at that time. At home, I forgot
about it completely until one day when, quite abruptly, in the middle of a
lecture I was attending, the imperious
command to
search for the memorable events of my life hit me like a bodily jolt, a nervous
spasm
that shook my entire body from head to toe.

I began to work in earnest. It took me months to rehash experiences in
my life that I believed
were meaningful to me. However, upon
examining my collection, I realized that I was dealing
only with ideas
that had no substance whatsoever. The events I remembered were just vague
points
of reference that I remembered abstractly. Once again, I had the most
unsettling suspicion
that I had been reared just to act
without ever stopping to feel anything.

One of the vaguest events I recalled, which I wanted to make memorable
at any cost, was the day I found out I had been admitted to graduate school at
UCLA. No matter how hard I tried, I
couldn't remember what I had
been doing that day. There was nothing interesting or unique about
that
day, except for the idea that it had to be memorable. Entering graduate school
should have
made me happy or proud of myself, but it didn't.

Another sample in my collection was the day I almost got married to Kay
Condor. Her last
name wasn't really Condor, but she had changed it
because she wanted to be an actress. Her ticket to fame was that she actually
looked like Carole Lombard. That day was memorable in my mind,
not
so much because of the events that took place but because she was beautiful and
wanted to
marry me. She was a head taller than I was, which made
her all the more interesting to me.

I was thrilled with the idea of marrying a tall woman, in a church
ceremony. I rented a gray
tuxedo. The pants were quite wide for
my height. They were not bell-bottoms; they were just wide, and that bothered
me no end. Another thing that annoyed me immensely was that the
sleeves
of the pink shirt I had bought for the occasion were about three inches too
long; I had to
use rubber bands to hold them up. Outside of that,
everything was perfect until the moment when
the guests and
I found out that Kay Condor had gotten cold feet and wasn't going to show up.

Being a very proper young lady, she had sent me a note of apology by
motorcycle messenger.
She wrote that she didn't believe in
divorce, and couldn't commit herself for the rest of her days to
someone
who didn't quite share her views on life. She reminded me that I snickered
every time I
said the name "Condor," something that showed a
total lack of respect for her person. She said
that she had
discussed the matter with her mother. Both of them loved me dearly, but not
enough to make me part of their family. She added that, bravely and wisely, we
all had to cut our losses.

My state of mind was one of total numbness. When I tried to recollect
that day, I couldn't
remember whether I felt horribly
humiliated at being left standing in front of a lot of people in my
gray,
rented tuxedo with the wide-legged pants, or whether I was crushed because Kay
Condor
didn't marry me.

These were the only two events I was capable of isolating with clarity.
They were meager
examples, but after rehashing them, I had succeeded
in re-dressing them as tales of philosophical
acceptance. I
thought of myself as a being who goes through life with no real feelings, who
has
only intellectual views of everything. Taking don Juan's
metaphors as models, I even constructed
one of my own:
a being who lives his life vicariously in terms of what it should be.

I believed, for instance, that the day I was admitted to graduate
school at UCLA should have
been a memorable day. Since it wasn't,
I tried my best to imbue it with an importance I was far
from
feeling. A similar thing happened with the day I nearly married Kay Condor. It
should have been a devastating day for me, but it wasn't. At the moment of
recollecting it, I knew that there
was nothing there and began to
work as hard as I could to construct what I should have felt.

The next time I went to don Juan's house I presented to him my two
samples of memorable
events as soon as I arrived.

"This is a pile of nonsense," he declared. "None of it
will do. The stories are related
exclusively to you as a person who
thinks, feels, cries, or doesn't feel anything at all. The memorable events of
a shaman's album are affairs that will stand the test of time because they have
nothing to do with him, and yet he is in the thick of them. He'll always be in
the thick of
them, for the duration of his life, and perhaps beyond,
but not quite personally."

His words left me feeling dejected, totally defeated. I sincerely
believed in those days that don
Juan was an intransigent old man who found special delight
in making me feel stupid. He
reminded me of
a master craftsman I had met at a sculptor's foundry where I worked while going
to art school. The master artisan
used to criticize and find flaws with everything his advanced
apprentices
did, and would demand that they correct their work according to his
recommendations. His apprentices would turn
around and pretend to correct their work. I
remembered the glee of the master when he would say, upon being
presented with the same work,
"Now
you have a real thing!"

"Don't feel bad," don Juan said, shaking me out of my
recollection. "In my time, I was in the
same spot. For
years, not only did I not know what to choose, I thought I had no experiences
to
choose from. It seemed that nothing had ever happened to
me. Of course, everything had
happened to me, but in my effort to
defend the idea of myself, I had no time or inclination to
notice
anything."

"Can you tell me, don Juan, specifically, what is wrong with my
stories? I know that they are
nothing, but the rest of my life is
just like that."

"I will repeat this to you," he said. "The stories of a
warrior's album are not personal. Your story of the day you were admitted
to
school is nothing but your assertion about you as the center of everything. You
feel, you
don't feel; you realize, you don't realize. Do you see
what I mean? All of the story is just you."
"But how
can it be otherwise, don Juan?" I asked.

"In your other story, you almost touch on what I want, but you
turn it again into something
extremely personal. I know that you
could add more details, but all those details would be an
extension
of your person and nothing else."

"I sincerely cannot see your point, don Juan," I protested.
"Every story seen through the eyes
of the witness
has to be, perforce, personal."

"Yes, yes, of course," he said, smiling, delighted as usual
by my confusion. "But then they are
not stories for
a warrior's album. They are stories for other purposes. The memorable events we
are after have the dark touch of the impersonal. That touch permeates them. I
don't know how
else to explain this."

I believed then that I had a moment of inspiration and that I understood
what he meant by the
dark touch of the impersonal. I
thought that he meant something a bit morbid. Darkness meant
that
for me. And I related to him a story from my childhood.

One of my older cousins was in medical school. He was an intern, and
one day he took me to
the morgue. He assured me that a young
man owed it to himself to see dead people because that
sight was very
educational; it demonstrated the transitoriness of life. He harangued me, on
and
on, in order to convince me to go. The more he talked
about how unimportant we were in death, the more curious I became. I had never
seen a corpse. My curiosity, in the end, to see one
overwhelmed me
and I went with him.

He showed me various corpses and succeeded in scaring me stiff. I found
nothing educational
or illuminating about them. They were, outright,
the most frightening things I had ever seen. As
he talked to
me, he kept looking at his watch as if he were waiting for someone who was
going to
show up at any moment. He obviously wanted to keep me in
the morgue longer than my strength
permitted. Being the
competitive creature that I was, I believed that he was testing my endurance,
my
manhood. 1 clenched my teeth and made up my mind to stay until the bitter end.

The bitter end came in ways that I had not dreamed of. A corpse that was
covered with a sheet
actually moved up with a rattle on the
marble table where all the corpses were lying, as if it were getting ready to
sit up. It made a burping sound that was so awful it burned through me and will
remain in my memory for the rest of my life. My cousin, the doctor, the
scientist, explained that it
was the corpse of a man who had died of
tuberculosis, and that his lungs had been eaten away by
bacilli that had left
enormous holes filled with air, and that in cases like this, when the air
changed temperature, it sometimes forced the body
to sit up or at least convulse.

"No, you haven't gotten it yet," don Juan said, shaking his
head from side to side. "It is merely
a story about
your fear. 1 would have been scared to death myself; however, being scared like
that doesn't illuminate anyone's path. But I'm curious to know what
happened to you."

"I yelled like a banshee," I said. "My cousin called me
a coward, a yellow-belly, for hiding
my face against his chest and
for getting sick to my stomach all over him."

I had definitely hooked on to a morbid strand in my life. I came up
with another story about
a
sixteen-year-old boy I knew in
high school who had a glandular disease and grew to a gigantic
height.
His heart did not grow at the same rate as the rest of his body and one day he
died of heart failure. I went with another boy to the mortuary out of morbid
curiosity. The mortician, who was
perhaps more morbid than the
two of us, opened the back door and let us in. He showed us his masterpiece. He
had put the gigantic boy, who had been over seven feet, seven inches tall, into
a
coffin for a normal person by sawing off his legs. He showed us how he
had arranged his legs as
if the dead boy were holding them with
his arms like two trophies.

The fright I experienced was comparable to the fright I had experienced
in the morgue as a child, but this new fright was not a physical reaction; it
was a reaction of psychological revulsion.

"You're almost there," don Juan said. "However, your
story is still too personal. It's revolting. It makes me sick, but I see great
potential."

Don Juan and I laughed at the horror found in situations of everyday
life. By then I was
hopelessly lost in the morbid strands I had caught
and released. I told him then the story of my
best friend,
Roy Goldpiss. He actually had a Polish surname, but his friends called him
Goldpiss
because whatever he touched, he turned to gold; he was a
great businessman.